Deep Fire Rising

by Du Brul, Jack

  It took Mercer several moments to spot the ship. Her hull was painted vivid red, her deck was clear green and her superstructure was covered in safety yellow. Even these garish colors were obscured by the ash and smoke that filled the air and wreaked havoc with all the machines in operation around the island. Each morning everyone on La Palma woke to the daily ritual of shaking out their clothes no matter how tightly sealed their bedrooms.

  The sky was a constant overcast of putrid greens and grays. The satellite pictures Mercer had seen showed the sickly plume spreading eastward from the prehistoric ax-shaped island. No matter how often he brushed his teeth or how much water he drank, Mercer’s mouth always felt gritty. The only place safe from the ash was upwind in a helicopter, and even there the air was heavy with the stench of sulfur.

  The pilot brought the Seahawk over the Petromax Angel’s fantail, flaring the helo over a clear spot on the deck. The navy chopper was too large to land on the workboat’s pad so he hovered just above the deck. Mercer opened the copilot’s door, tossed his duffel to the metal deck and leapt the four feet. He paused as a crewman slid open the rear door and helped Tisa make the jump. Mercer caught her and the two remained crouched until the Seahawk peeled away.

  Charlie Williams and Jim McKenzie were the first to greet him. They’d boarded the Angel at Cherbourg, France, along with their gear, which had been flown in from Guam on an air force C-5 Galaxy. It was the first he’d seen of the two since the dive on the USS Smithback.

  “I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for calling us in,” Jim greeted, shaking hands.

  “It all depends if we succeed.”

  “He’s only speaking for himself,” C.W. said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. Talk about your opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “I bet even your wife approves of this one.”

  “Only after she conned Jim into letting her come.”

  That surprised Mercer, but he let it pass. Her presence here didn’t matter. He introduced Tisa to the two marine scientists and asked, “You guys have everything you need?”

  “What we didn’t bring,” McKenzie said, trying to light his cigar against the wind, “the folks here on the Angel have. But with an entire cargo jet to fill, we stripped about everything but the plumbing out of the Surveyor.”

  “And the second diver? Alan Jervis?”

  C.W.’s typical jovial expression faded. “He won’t be diving again. Kind of delayed shock or something. The night after you left he woke up screaming. The docs had to dope him up just so he could sleep. He’s still in a hospital in Guam.”

  Mercer was shaken. Jervis had seemed fine the few extra days Mercer had spent on the Sea Surveyor. “I had no idea.”

  “Neither did we,” Jim agreed, puffing on his Cuban. “But it does happen.”

  “You’re okay, aren’t you?” Mercer asked C.W.

  The lanky Californian grinned. “Taking risks is why they pay us. Seriously, I’m fine. Spirit and I talked a lot about it. I think what happened down there scared her more than it scared me. That’s why she insisted on coming. We have a backup diver. Scott Glass. He’s damned good.”

  “And your team is settled here on the Angel? No problems with the regular crew?”

  Charlie dismissed the notion. “Are you kidding? Underwater technology is one of the few areas where academia leads industry in having the latest and greatest. Their guys would love to get their hands on my suits. As we sailed down from France we already decided to use Conseil, the ROV we brought, rather than the two owned by Petromax. We finished the software download this morning.”

  Jim cut in, “Besides, we all know what’s at stake here. No one is going to fight a turf battle with so much on the line.”

  Mercer nodded. “All right. Les Donnelley spent last week talking with every local diver still left on the island and has taken temperature readings all the way around La Palma. He’s pinpointed three volcanic vents along the eastern coast below the Cumbre ridge that may suit our needs. Two of them show a steady rise in temperature so we think they are active. The third has remained dormant. It’s down a hundred eighty feet so few have dived into the tunnel. We don’t know what to expect.”

  “How hot is the water around the other vents right now?”

  “At their mouths, about eighty-four degrees. That’s twenty above the ambient water for their depths.”

  “My ADS can take temperatures up to two hundred,” C.W. stated.

  “We may need that capability if this last vent pans out. For now we’ll check the dormant tunnel with the ROV before committing anyone to the water.” Mercer handed Jim McKenzie a notebook opened about halfway. “Here are the coordinates. Get these to the captain and let’s get to it.”

  C.W. and Jim left Mercer and Tisa alone at the rail of the stubby workboat. A half mile from shore the island didn’t look dangerous. They could almost pretend the pall was just smoke from a forest fire and not the sulfurous discharge from deep within the earth.

  “I find it interesting,” Tisa noted, looking up at him. Even in the ruddy glow of the near-eclipsed sun, her dark hair shimmered. “People take orders from you as though they’ve worked for you for years.”

  Mercer demurred. “The three of us shared a pretty wild experience.”

  “Not just Jim and C.W. Others too, even your boss, Admiral Lasko.”

  Mercer looked out across the waters to the island. “I never really thought about it. I see something that needs to be done and if I can’t do it I find people who can. I think the trick is finding the right people. Any idiot can manage a group who knows what they’re doing.” He smiled. “All I have to do is make sure I surround myself with experts and I get to look good.”

  She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Fool.”

  Six hours later, the Petromax Angel was in position near where Les Donnelley, the chief volcanologist on La Palma, had thought there was a suitable vent. The boat’s bow and stern thrusters were slaved to the dynamic positioning computer that was receiving updates every half second from global positioning satellites. She was as stable as if she’d been anchored to the seafloor.

  Jim McKenzie sat in the glow of several video monitors, his hands on the joysticks that controlled Conseil, their ROV, which they’d named after the assistant to Professor Aronnax in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Behind him in the control were Mercer, Tisa, Charlie and Spirit Williams, and a mix of people from Petromax and the crew Jim had brought from the Sea Surveyor. The control van bolted to the Angel’s deck hummed with computers and the hiss of air purifiers. The doors had to remain closed because of the dust and the air-conditioning labored to dispel all the body heat.

  Outside of the steel box, workers were monitoring Conseil’s umbilical as it unreeled from the huge stern-mounted spool. The bug-eyed ROV sank deeper into the waters.

  Jim had a well-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth and a fresh pitcher of ice water at hand. His fingers were light on the controls, and the cameras on the unmanned submersible had become his eyes.

  The ROV was the size of, and roughly the same shape as, a queen-sized bed but was made of high-strength steel, carbon fiber and composite ceramics. It carried four sets of extreme-low-light stereoscopic cameras, as well as a manipulator arm, pressure and temperature gauges, and a chemistry suite that allowed it to analyze water on a continuous basis.

  “Okay, boys and girls,” Jim said without looking at his audience. “We’re dropping through one fifty. Connie’s board shows green.”

  On the monitor they could see virtually nothing other than the glare from lights mounted directly above the cameras. The ROV was still falling, and Jim kept it well away from the island’s underwater basalt foundation.

  “What’s the temp?” asked a Petromax technician.

  “A bracing sixty-two degrees,” Jim answered. “No sign of volcanic heating.”

  Mercer was relieved. The San Juan volcano loomed directly above their l
ocation. While lava had begun to jet from vents on the southern part of the island, San Juan, in the island’s middle, merely rumbled and occasionally belched ash.

  Designed to probe the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, Conseil had no problems as Jim brought the ROV to a hover at one hundred eighty feet, a depth that even a scuba diver could work.

  “The vent should be a hundred yards ahead of us and a bit to the left,” Jim intoned as he spooled up the nimble craft’s propulsors.

  He eased the ROV forward, keeping one eye on the video feed and another on the sonar screen that was mapping the irregularities of the undersea cliff. An accidental brush with the rock, even this shallow, could damage the remotely operated vehicle.

  “All right, I see the cliff.”

  On the screen a murky shadow resolved itself into a jagged promontory of solidified lava. As he nosed the craft forward for a better look, the team could see the lava had formed in long ropes that had once shot from the vent like toothpaste. This pillow lava, as it was called, was what they all expected. To Mercer it looked like the ruins of a Greek temple, with the longer, straighter pieces of lava resembling fallen columns.

  “Judging by the size of that lava,” he said, “I’d say our vent is big enough.” The shafts of rock were easily fifteen feet in diameter.

  “We’re below the vent.” Jim brought Conseil up ten feet, then another thirty.

  They lost sight of the pillow lava but didn’t spot the vent opening. He swiveled the ROV, searching along the dark cliff for the blacker spot of the volcanic vent. Nothing. He dropped Conseil back to their original starting point, moved ten feet to the left and allowed the robot to ascend. The dozen pairs of eyes watching the screen all thought they saw the vent, but it was their desire, not reality. Once the ROV had risen above the layer of pillow lava, Jim sank her again and started a new search lane another ten feet to the left.

  They ran fifty vertical lanes before the area of lava ended entirely. Four painstaking hours had been wasted.

  “No one said this was going to be easy,” Jim opined, undaunted by the job. He maneuvered Conseil to where they first encountered the lava and methodically started the next stripe ten feet to the right.

  “I thought I put us right on the spot,” Les Donnelley said miserably.

  “Don’t sweat it, man,” Charlie offered. “We learned a long time ago that you can’t find anything underwater until it wants to be found.” He turned to his wife. “Any dowsing tricks you can use to help?”

  Spirit squeezed his hand. “Sorry, lover, that only works when you’re looking for water. How about you, Dr. Mercer? You always seem to have a bag of tricks up your sleeve.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

  Mercer didn’t notice. “Not this time.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You only perform miracles when your own ass is on the line.”

  He shot her a look, but let it pass.

  After another hour and ten more search lanes, the lava field petered out once again.

  “Damn.” The mild expletive was the most emotion Jim McKenzie had shown since starting the search while the others were showing signs of their anger and frustration. “The vent that spewed this stuff must have been sealed sometime in the past. So now what?”

  They’d covered a mere thirty-five hundred square feet, a tiny fraction of the cliff face. Without a more precise idea of the vent’s location, they could spend the next week scouring the undersea wall without finding it.

  “I am so sorry, guys,” Les kept repeating. “The divers I talked to were certain there was a vent here.”

  “Go back to our original starting point,” Mercer ordered, “and let Connie descend.”

  “Why down and not up?” Spirit Williams challenged. “The vent could be above where we’ve searched just as easily as below.”

  “It’s a guess,” Mercer admitted. “But an educated one. Charlie can back me on this. He’s a more experienced diver than I am. I think the answer is nitrogen narcosis, also called rapture of the deep. It’s a feeling that can overwhelm a diver working at depth not unlike drunkenness. You get impaired judgment, lack of motor coordination and feelings of euphoria. Now suppose the divers Les talked to had been affected by nitrogen narcosis when they discovered the vent. Chances are they would have been deeper than they thought, not shallower.”

  C.W. nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

  “And what if they were a mile south of here, or a mile north when they dove?” Spirit countered.

  “They were on the surface when they fixed their position,” Charlie answered her challenge. “I’m sure they could read a handheld GPS.”

  Spirit didn’t like that her husband defended Mercer and shook off the hand he had around her waist. She crossed her arms over her chest and stormed out of the control van.

  Jim ignored her outburst. “I think Mercer’s on to something. I’ll let Connie sink down to three hundred and see what we see.”

  “That’s way below how deep a diver can go on scuba gear.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Jim backed Conseil away from the cliff and let the ROV slowly drift deeper into the abyss. He kept the cameras pointed straight down so he could avoid any rock outcrops as the little robot sank.

  At two hundred seventy feet they found another platform covered in ropes of pillow lava. “Bingo!”

  The cell phone in the pocket of Mercer’s khakis vibrated. Rather than disturb the others, he stepped out of the control van. The air was crisp but heavily laden with fine ash particles. It had a metallic taste and Mercer couldn’t take deep breaths without the urge to cough.

  The sun was setting beyond the Cumbre ridge. It silhouetted the volcanic formation, creating an undulating line of darkness and light. Because of the ash in the atmosphere, the color was more melon than yellow. To the south, where molten rock fountained from the Teneguia volcano, the sky’s glow was unworldly and hellish.

  He fished the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. The caller-ID feature showed Ira Lasko’s number. They spoke at least ten times a day. “What’s the latest?” Mercer answered.

  “I’ve got something for your file of the most ridiculous things you’ve ever heard. The North Korean delegation to the United Nations is willing to drop their objections to us using a nuke on La Palma if we give them permission to test one of their own. Get this—they say that a detonation on the island is a peaceful use of nuclear weapons and that their test would also have a beneficial purpose.”

  “Yeah, beneficial in scaring the crap out of Japan and South Korea. What’s the UN’s reaction?”

  “Publicly they don’t have much choice but to allow it. The way the resolution was drafted every nation has to agree for us to get permission. Privately, as soon as they run their test, the germane countries are going to sanction them even further into the Stone Age.”

  Mercer snorted. “What else is going on?”

  “The team at Lawrence Livermore have come up with the weapon you need. It’s an old W-54 SADM.”

  “Saddam?”

  “Small Atomic Demolition Munition. It was developed in the fifties to be fired from the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle. The engineers have modified its plutonium implosion core to push up the yield. Originally it was a one-kiloton warhead. They’ve brought it up to four and a half, which Dr. Marie says should be sufficient.”

  “Provided we can find the vent,” Mercer said.

  “No luck yet?”

  “We’re closing in,” was all Mercer would give. “How big is the bomb?”

  “Ah, hold on. About two feet square.”

  “Sounds like the legendary suitcase bomb.”

  “It is, or was. When they increased the yield they had to add shielding. It weighs in at two hundred sixty pounds.”

  By attaching lifting bags to the warhead, Mercer was confident that the ROV could position it in the vent.

  “Can I call you back in a minute?” Ira asked suddenly. “My boss is on the other line. I think it’s
important.”

  “Sure.” The call had already been cut.

  Mercer stayed at the rail, leaning far over to watch the occasional boil of water when the thrusters kicked on to keep the Petromax Angel in position. The control van door opened. Tisa stood poised until she spotted him. As project director Mercer rarely slept in the same place on two consecutive nights so they’d had very little time together since their arrival in the Canaries.

  Yet even these absences, and the shadow of the impending cataclysm, couldn’t spoil their budding relationship. She made every second magical, like the candlelight bath in his hotel room, or the midnight stroll she’d taken him on through gnarled olive trees. In the very heart of the grove, she’d erected a tent for them.

  She smiled as she sidled up to him, slipping her arms over his shoulders and drawing his mouth to hers. “I think I should be jealous,” she said.

  “Jealous, why?”

  “That woman, Spirit. I think she’s in love with you.”

  Mercer was even more confused. “What?”

  “You have to admit she is beautiful.” He could tell she was teasing him.

  “I suppose so,” he said, as if giving the question serious consideration, “if you’re one of those guys who goes for women with long legs, a big chest and dark smoldering eyes,” inviting a quick slap to the hip.

  She massaged the spot in widening circles until she had a firm grip on his backside. “I’m not kidding about her. She’s attracted to alpha males. I bet back home she and C.W. are the center of their social group. Out here her husband looks to you for leadership. She doesn’t like it, while at the same time she’s also attracted to you. That’s why she’s always nasty.”

  “You got all this from the tone of her voice?”

  “Oh, she’s not that subtle. When you’re not looking she can’t take her eyes off you. And since I don’t think she owns a bra, her arousal can be obvious.”

  Mercer burst out laughing and it took several moments for him to catch his breath.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “My life is starting to sound like a cheesy potboiler. Pretty soon you and Spirit will get into a catfight and then Charlie and I will have to defend the honor of our women or something.”